A New Song

by Jan Karon

  There was a new spring in his step; he felt a fresh excitement both at home and at church.

  “You’re mighty perky,” said a member of the Altar Guild, who was trimming candlewicks in the vesting room.

  “Darling, you’re positively glowing!” said his wife, who appeared to be unusually sunny herself.

  “Hit’ll be good t’ clap eyes on you ’uns,” said Harley. “I’ll make us a pan of brownies.”

  “I’m really glad you’re comin’,” said Dooley.

  In the grand anticipation of it all, he made a long-distance “house call” to Uncle Billy.

  “I’ll be et f’r a tater if it ain’t th’ preacher!” exclaimed the old man, obviously delighted.

  “Just checking on your knee, Uncle Billy.”

  “My knee? Hit’s th’ same as ever, ol’ arthur’s got it, don’t you know.”

  “I thought Emma said you were having knee surgery.”

  “Nossir, what I had was tree surgery.”

  “Aha. Well. Tell me about it.”

  “Hit was a big to-do, don’t you know, th’ town sent a crew t’ doctor them old trees out back, they was rotted in some places and about t’ fall over. Wellsir, they was there all day Wednesday, then come back again and was there all day Thursday, had a big crane an’ all. Hit was like a tent meetin’ th’ way people turned out t’ watch, we could of went t’ sellin’ corn dogs. Wish you’d been here.”

  “We’ll be there late Thursday for a short visit. I’ll get by and see you and Miss Rose on Saturday.”

  “Hit’ll be a treat an’ a half t’ see you ’uns, I’ll ask Rose t’ whip up a banana puddin’.”

  “Don’t go to any trouble,” said Father Tim, meaning it. “In fact, don’t even think about it!”

  “We’re going home, old buddy,” he said to Barnabas as they loped toward Ernie’s. “We’re going to see Dooley, remember Dooley?”

  Of course his dog remembered Dooley. Any dog with a penchant for Wordsworth, Cowper, and Keats was a smart dog.

  Just four days and he’d be good as new, ready to pour himself back into St. John’s and no need to run home again until October for Buck’s and Pauline’s wedding, which he’d cleared with his bishop early on.

  He felt positively on holiday. He would put in five hours at St. John’s, and dash home to pack and take Cynthia and Jonathan out for an early dinner. Then, at six-thirty tomorrow morning, they were out of here.

  Janette’s doctor reported only mild response to the medication. It would take time, he said, for her to feel any meaningful effects; meanwhile, they were monitoring her closely.

  He called Janette’s room. No answer. He thought he should have her approval to take Jonathan all the way to the other end of the state, but he dreaded the possibility of upsetting her. What if she felt bereft, knowing that her priest and children were all off the island? He recalled that even her doctor was leaving on Friday to play golf in Beaufort.

  Marion agreed to go to the hospital after church on Sunday. He caught Jean Ballenger leaving a Busy Fingers class, and asked her to visit Janette on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

  “Oh, yes!” she said. “I’ll go. I enjoy the sick.”

  “Here,” he said, taking out his wallet and giving her five dollars. “If you don’t mind, please buy her some oranges, or . . .”

  Jean took the bill. “Would you like them maybe in a basket with a little bow on the handle?”

  “I’d be much obliged,” he said.

  “I could put in a pot of African violets for another five,” she said, eyeing his wallet.

  He had celebrated Holy Eucharist with seven of the faithful remnant and four tourists from Canada, cleared his desk, returned his calls, thoroughly discussed Sunday’s music with Ella Bridgewater by phone, and alerted the choir to be on their best behavior. He had also shown a couple from Delaware around the cemetery, typed the pew bulletin, emptied his wastebasket, and stamped the mail.

  He was walking out the door when the phone rang.

  “St. John’s in the Grove!” he said. Then, feeling suddenly inspired to elaborate, he quoted the psalmist. “ ‘This is the day the Lord has made!’ ”

  There was a brief silence on the other end. “Timothy?”

  Sounded like Bill Harvey.

  “Speaking.”

  “That was a very upbeat phone greeting.” It was Bill Harvey, all right.

  “I’m feeling upbeat, Bishop, how are you?”

  “Wanting to have a little talk with you about something.” Bill Harvey was not speaking in his let’s-go-fishing voice; this was his high-church, gospel-side vox populi.

  “Shoot!” He may as well walk straight into the wind, head down and hunkered over.

  “It comes to my attention that you’re making a little trip to Mitford.”

  “Why . . . yes.” He cleared his throat. “Just four days.”

  “To attend, I believe, to the needs of several former parishioners . . .”

  “Well . . . yes.” He’d mentioned to one or two people why he was going away, but had said nothing about Dooley.

  “. . . and dismissing, I presume, your sworn duty to attend to the needs of your current parishioners?”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way, Bishop.” His stomach did a small turn.

  “It’s time you thought of it that way, Timothy. You know very well the policy of the church, and that is to be strictly hands-off the old parish while you go about the business of the new. Surely it doesn’t escape your memory that Lord’s Chapel has a priest of its own to attend these people.”

  “Certainly.” He heard his voice come near to croaking. He didn’t think it would help matters to say his boy had been in jail and might like a little cheering up before he went off to school.

  Then again, the bishop was right, he wasn’t supposed to meddle in the business of Mitford’s new priest. But these people were his friends. . . .

  “But they’re my friends,” he said, knowing it would avail him nothing.

  “Of course they’re your friends, you served them for sixteen years.”

  “It was my wish to . . . I only wished to—”

  “If wishes were horses, Timothy, beggars would ride. Let us stick to the point. I believe you’re going to Mitford in October to conduct a wedding.”

  “Yes.”

  “I strongly caution you against this current jaunt.”

  Suddenly out of breath, he thumped into his desk chair and stared unseeing at the wall.

  His wife gave the entire episcopate a fine tongue-lashing, mincing no words, and got over the whole incident in a trice. While he enjoyed her stinging barbs, they did little to soothe his sense of injury. It was true that, in principle, Bill Harvey was right, but he’d found his tone of voice, his corporate indifference, rude beyond measure. He was accustomed to a bishop whose kindness extended throughout his diocese, with seeming affection for all his deacons and priests; indeed, he was proud to have in Stuart Cullen a bishop who actually wrote important letters “in his own hand,” as St. Paul himself had been pleased to do.

  “Blast!” he said, looking out the kitchen window. “Double blast!”

  “That’s right, darling, let it all out!” encouraged his wife, who was buttering Jonathan’s spaghetti.

  “Blast!” said Jonathan, smacking the table with both hands.

  Why hadn’t he kept his big mouth shut about going home? He felt like a traitor, a heel, disappointing everyone. And now he had to go back over all the ground he’d plowed, calling everyone and making excuses. . . .

  “You need something . . . vigorous to do,” she suggested.

  “I’ll take Barnabas and go running,” he said testily.

  “Isn’t your fishing trip coming up soon?”

  Fishing trip! The very last thing he wanted to do was go on a fishing trip. A fine spectacle he’d make, knowing almost nothing about a rod and reel, and even less about sliding around on the deck of a boat with an eight hundred and fifty horse
power engine throbbing under his tennis shoes. Didn’t he make a fool of himself every Sunday morning of his life? Why do it all over again on a trip that was costing his wife a cool two hundred bucks, not including a bucket of chicken?

  Miss Rose answered the phone with a positive shout. “Hello!”

  “Miss Rose? This is Father Tim.”

  “Are you here?”

  “No, ma’am, I’m here,” he shouted back. “You see, something’s . . . come up.”

  “What’s that? Bum luck?”

  “Well, yes, in a way. May I speak with Uncle Billy?”

  She turned from the phone and squawked, “Bill! Bill Watson! It’s our old preacher!”

  He thought she might have put it another way.

  There was a long silence.

  “I’m sorry, son.”

  Dooley sighed. “I know. It’s OK. Really.”

  “I’m going to try and have the court date set during the time I’m home for the wedding. You’ll be home then, too, so I believe everything’s going to work out just fine.”

  “Great,” said Dooley, sounding relieved.

  “Have fun these last days. How are Poo and Jessie?”

  “Really good!”

  He heard the sudden tenderness in the boy’s voice.

  “And your mother?”

  “She’s really good, too, she got a raise at Hope House.”

  “Glad news! You’re always in our prayers, buddy. God cares about your needs.”

  “OK, ’bye.” said Dooley. “Wait. That woman upstairs ...”

  “What about her?”

  “She plays the dern piano mighty loud. Me’n Harley are thinkin’ about knockin’ on th’ ceiling with a broom handle.”

  And he’d been worried about Dooley’s music aggravating his tenant. “I wouldn’t do that. Hang in there.”

  “I got Lace a card.”

  “Great! I did, too.”

  “It was hard as heck to pick out, there are millions of cards.”

  “True. What did it say?”

  “Nothin.’ It was blank.”

  “Aha.”

  “I just wrote in it, ‘I’m sorry.’ ”

  “Couldn’t be better.”

  “I signed my whole name, in case she knows anybody else named Dooley.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Well, I got to go, Avis wants me to clean out th’ butcher case. Gross. I told him I’ll pick up anything but liver, he has to do that. I mean, you can feel liver all the way through those weird gloves we have to wear.”

  “Please!” he said, bilious at the thought.

  It wrenched his heart to say goodbye. But what were hearts for, in the end? A little wrenching now and then was far, far better than no wrenching at all.

  He was trying to forgive Bill Harvey. In the scheme of things, the bishop’s attitude was hardly worth his concern. Why couldn’t he blow by it, forgive and forget? Of no small concern, however, was the hardness that would come in if he didn’t forgive this slight. He was to drag it into the light and expose it before God and get it over with.

  He dropped to his knees in the study and prayed silently. The early morning breeze pushed through open windows and puffed the curtains into the room.

  There was a tap on his shoulder.

  “What are you doin’?” asked Jonathan, standing next to him in rumpled blue pajamas.

  He rose from his knees and picked the boy up. They thumped into the chair, Jonathan in his lap. “I was praying.”

  “Why?” Jonathan snuggled against him.

  “That I might find God’s grace to forgive someone.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if I don’t forgive this person, it will be unhealthy for me, and God won’t think much of it, either.”

  He loved the chunky, vibrant feel of the boy on his lap, the warm, solid weight against his chest. Exactly the way God wants us to come to Him, he thought, his spirits suddenly brightening.

  “I don’t want p’sketti no more. No p’sketti.”

  “Good! Hallelujah! What do you want?”

  Jonathan pondered this, then looked up at him. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, if you don’t, who does?”

  Jonathan poked him in the chest with a chubby finger. “You find somethin’.”

  “Please.”

  “Please.”

  “Consider it done.”

  He and Cynthia had been transplanted, that was all. He knew from years of digging around in the dirt and moving perennials from one corner of the yard to another what transplanting was about. First came the wilt, then the gradual settling in, then the growth spurt. That simple. What had Gertrude Jekyll said to the gardener squeamish about moving a plant or bush? “Hoick it!”

  God had hoicked him and he’d better get over the wilt and get busy putting down roots.

  He went out to the porch, whistling. Glorious day—his fair wife sitting contentedly in a rocker, Jonathan rigged with a straw hat and playing in the garden with his dog, and an afternoon romp in the ocean on the family agenda.

  He sat in one of the white rockers and kicked off his loafers. “Ahhhh!” he sighed.

  “Timothy, you have that wilderness look again.”

  “What wilderness look?” he asked, as if he didn’t know.

  “That John the Baptist look.”

  He had been in denial about it for some time, now, until his hair had fanned out over his clerical collar like the tail of a turkey gobbler. He just didn’t seem to have what it took to break in a new barber.

  “I hear there’s a little shop next to the post office, Linda’s or Libbie’s or Lola’s . . . something like that.”

  “Aha.” No, indeed. He’d cut it himself with an oyster knife before he’d put his head in the hands of another Fancy Skinner.

  “I’ll hold out for a barber, thank you,” he said, feeling imperious.

  He checked the answering machine when they came in from the grocery store.

  “Father? It’s me, Puny.”

  Puny didn’t sound like herself.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this.”

  This was definitely his least favorite way for a phone call to begin.

  “I just got to your house and realized I’d left th’ door unlocked for four days!”

  “Speak to Ba!” one of the twins pleaded.

  “How in th’ world I did a dumb thing like that, I don’t know, I’m jis’ so sorry. But I’ve looked and looked, and nothin’ seems missin’, so I think it’s all right, but I know how you count on me to take care of things, and I jis’ hate lettin’ you down on anything.”

  “It’s OK!” he said aloud to the machine. He loved that girl like his own flesh. “Don’t worry about it!”

  “I know you sometimes don’t lock your doors, but I always do because I’m responsible for things here, and I jis’ hope that . . . anyway, we’re real sorry you aren’t comin’, we all looked forward to it a lot, and I hope you’ll not think hard of me for leavin’ your door unlocked.”

  “Speak to Ba, speak to Ba!”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, Sissy, you’ll wake up Sassy, here!”

  “Ba! Come home, we got puppies. Come home, Ba!”

  “Say ’bye, now. Tell ’im you love ’im.”

  “Love you, Ba.”

  “Tell ’im you love Miss Cynthia.”

  “Love Miss Cynthy.”

  “That was Sissy. Sassy’s still asleep,” said his industrious house help. “We’ve got an awful mess of puppies in th’ garage, four little speckled things, I don’t know what they are, oh, mercy, I’m prob’ly usin’ up all your tape, now here’s th’ good news! Joe Joe’s been promoted to lieutenant! That’s right under th’ chief. How d’you like that?”

  He liked it very much indeed.

  “We thought you was goin’ home,” said Roanoke.

  “Change of plans. Where’s Ernie this morning?”

  “Him an’ Roger’s gone fishin’.”

  “C
aptain Willie?”

  “Nope. Over to th’ Sound.”

  “You’re minding the store?”

  “You got it,” said Roanoke. Father Tim thought he’d never seen so many wrinkles in one face. Roanoke Clark, it might be said, looked like he’d been hung out to dry and left on the line.

  He didn’t exactly relish the idea of spending one-on-one time with a man who didn’t like preachers. Then again, it was only six-thirty in the morning, and not a darned thing to do at the church office, since he’d already done it all for the trip to Mitford.

  What the heck. He thumped down at a table, unwrapped his egg biscuit, and took the lid off his coffee.

  “So . . . how’s business?”

  “We had a big run this mornin’, it slacked off just before you come in.”

  He ate his biscuit while Roanoke read the paper and smoked.

  “What about a good barber on the island? Know anybody?”

  “Don’t have an official barber on th’ island. Have t’ go across.”

  “Seems a waste of time to be running back and forth to the mainland just to get your hair trimmed.”

  Roanoke appeared to be talking to the newspaper he was holding in front of him. “Lola up by th’ post office, she’ll give you a trim. You won’t need t’ go back ’til Christmas.”

  “Who’s Lola?”

  “Lola sells fish san’wiches, cuts hair, you name it.”

  He shivered. “Is that where you get your hair cut?”

  “Once every two months, whether I need it or not.”

  He examined Roanoke’s haircut. No way.

  “So, ah, where do Ernie and Roger get their hair cut?”

  “I do it.”

  “You do it?”

  “Keep my barber tools in th’ book room over there.” Roanoke indicated the book room with a wave of his hand.

  “Aha.”

  “Six bucks a pop,” said Roanoke, laying the paper on the table. “Six bucks and fifteen minutes, that’s my motto.”

  “Did you . . . ever cut hair for a living?”

  “I cut hair for truckers. When I was haulin’ sheet metal, I had a stopover in Concord twice a month; I set up in th’ back room of a barbecue joint. They rolled in there from New York City, Des Moines, Iowa, Los Alamos, Calfornia, you name it, they lined up from here to yonder.” Roanoke looked proud of this fact, installing a fresh cigarette behind his ear.